Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

I visited my family this past week and took my neice (age 7) to Zion National Park in Utah to work on her Junior Ranger Badge. As part of the requirements she had to attend a ranger led program and we opted for the Amazing Animals talk about bears. I got a little nervous when Ranger Colton put the vocabulary words on the board (see first picture) but I thought he did a great job of explaining what each of them meant and getting input from the children. I also liked his graph representing the diet of the black bear - shading in 70% for plants, 20% for water creatures, and 10% for large game (see the board in the last picture). He had a bear skin and talked about the adaptations they had for being successful in their environment - claws, fur, and teeth that were both flat and pointed for grinding plants and chewing meat. The program was 45 minutes long and he had children go outside to participate in an activity where they became black bears and had to get resources in or

I have been exposed to "mind maps" before but I've never used them in the notebooks. I saw this pin on Pinterest (see first picture) which got me thinking about how they can be used in notebooks. Using my trusty craft supplies I created two mind maps in my practice notebook. The first had to do with the water cycle and the second I was thinking of  using it as an end of unit review. Here were some of my thoughts as I was creating them. 1. Student would need some serious modeling when introducing "mind maps". You can not just show them a sample and say "go". It probably would be best to do it as a group and then have students copy it into their notebook a couple of times so they get the general idea of how it works. 2. I think this would only appeal to the artistic children. I don't think it would damage the non-artistic children to go through the process of creating a mind map but when I was doing it I was thinking t

At the request of some of my readers I have now added an email widget where you input your email and you get notified of updates to this blog via email (which is WAY easier then having to check back every so often to see if I posted anything :) Enjoy and sign up!

This is part of my "pull out" mania this year. I thought it would be fun for students to draw an environment complete with at least three animals and two plants and then discuss adaptations they have that help them survive in that environment on the pull out tab.

This idea was loosely based on something I saw on Pinterest . I had the child pick an animal at the top of the food chain and create a food chain inside its belly. In hindsight she probably didn't need to have the tiger represented (since it was already represented by the drawing). This would fall under 5th grade standards here in South Carolina and I am thinking of how it could be modified to represent fossil fuels in our energy unit.

Sorry I have been absent a bit this past month. With school winding down there has been a lot to do! I have been working on some right hand assignment ideas and borrowed some fourth graders to help me out. This one was adapted from a hallyway display I saw outside a second grade classroom (see third picture). I thought it could be easily adapted and used in a notebook.